The Book of Air and Shadows

hadn’t been the same man since. As soon as he said that, as soon as those words drifted into the air, I felt a sort of balloon pop inside my head and…it’s hard to describe, not really a woo-woo type of out-of-body experience, more of a profound detachment, as if Ed were gabbing away at someone who wasn’t really me.
    It was quite interesting, really, in a hideous way, and I thought unaccountably of my mother in her last days and wondered whether this was how she felt: alone in that crummy apartment, kids gone (yes, there was me, but didn’t I make it obvious that it was grim duty alone that brought me to her), a stupid job-why keep going, what was the point? Ed was now talking about turning my work over to various associates-just until you can get back on your feet-and part of that work was, of course, the cell phone ring tones. And this phrase now completely occupied my brain (
cell phone ring tones! CELLPHONE RINGTONES!!!
), and the force of the absurdity struck me like a pie in the face: here we were, grown men, actual human beings, the crown of creation, concerned with making sure that money would be paid out in the proper way whenever some idiot’s cell phone went
bee-dee-boop-a-doop-doop
instead of
ding-ding-a-ling
and this connected in a strange way with the detached feeling and thinking about my mother and I started to laugh and cry at the same time and could not stop for an excruciatingly long time.
    Ms. Maldonado was summoned, and she wisely thought to call Omar, who came up and swept me out the side entrance of our suite, so as not to embarrass anyone or frighten the secretaries. On the ride back to my place I asked Omar if he had ever considered suicide. He said he had after his youngest boy had been shot in the head while throwing rocks at soldiers during the first intifada, he said he wanted to blow up himself and as many of them as possible, and there were people in Fatah encouraging that sort of thing then. But he thought it was a sin, both the suicide and killing ordinary people. Dying
after
you assassinated someone in power was a different story, but no one had ever given him the opportunity to do that. So he had come to America instead.
    That afternoon was when I retrieved this pistol I have here from its lair in the back of my utility closet and for the first time seriously asked Camus’s big question, since, unfortunately, I was already
in
America. I even stuck the barrel in my mouth just to taste the tang of death, and I did a little active imagining, trying to think of anyone who would be at all inconvenienced by my death right then. Amalie would be relieved and free to marry someone worthier of her. The kids hardly knew I was alive to begin with. Paul would be pissed off but get over it; Miriam would up her medication for a month or so. Ingrid would obtain another lover, indistinguishable from me in any important respect. In my will Omar gets the Lincoln and a nice bequest, so he’d be better off as well.
    Obviously, I did not at that time pull the trigger, since I am still here and typing. In fact, I recovered from my hysteria fairly rapidly, one of the advantages of being as shallow as a dish. Nor did I go to bed for a week, forgo eating, stop shaving. No, I thought at the time, the Jake persona would click once more into place and I would continue with what passed for my life, only without the ring tones. In the end I think it was curiosity that kept me alive. I wanted to find out how Bracegirdle’s spying went, and to see if that play still existed, and I wanted to meet Osip Shvanov. Yes, curiosity and a mild desire for revenge. I wanted to find out whose little schemes had fucked up my life, and I wanted to get my hands on the woman who had played Miranda Kellogg and played me for a fool.

    My appointment with Shvanov was at ten in SoHo, but I had a previous appointment uptown, for I had promised to take Imogen to her rehearsal at the kids’ school. Mrs. Rylands, the drama teacher at the Copley Academy, does
Midsummer Night’s Dream
every third year, alternating with
R. & J.
and
The Tempest
. Last year, Imo played a spirit in the latter play, but this year she has the part of Titania and is insufferably proud. I did not see her perform that spirit because, as I think I’ve mentioned, I do not go to the theater, and not because I didn’t like what they’re showing nowadays. I literally cannot bear to sit in a darkened auditorium and watch live actors on a stage. My tubes